The main goal of the present study is to thoroughly test the recently derived OBurnett equations for the normal shock wave flow problem for a wide range of Mach number (
$3 \leq Ma \leq 9$
). A dilute gas system composed of hard-sphere molecules is considered and the numerical results of the OBurnett equations are validated against in-house results from the direct simulation Monte Carlo method. The primary focus is to study the orbital structures in the phase space (velocity–temperature plane) and the variation of hydrodynamic fields across the shock. From the orbital structures, we observe that the heteroclinic trajectory exists for the OBurnett equations for all the Mach numbers considered, unlike the conventional Burnett equations. The thermodynamic consistency of the equations is also established by showing positive entropy generation across the shock. Further, the equations give smooth shock structures at all Mach numbers and significantly improve upon the results of the Navier–Stokes equations. With no tweaking of the equations in any way, the present work makes two important contributions by putting forward an improved theory of shock waves and establishing the validity of the OBurnett equations for solving complex flow problems.
Three-dimensional (3D) direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) has been used to simulate flow in a straight microchannel using an in-house parallelized code. In the present work, a comparative study of seven boundary conditions is carried out with respect to time required for achieving steady-state, accuracy in predicting the specified pressure at the boundaries, and the total simulation time required for attaining a statistical error within one percent. The effect of changing the Knudsen number, pressure ratio (PR), and cross aspect ratio (CAR) on these parameters is also studied. The presence of a boundary is seen to affect the simulated pressure in a cell when compared to the specified pressure, the difference being highest for corner cells and least for cells away from walls. All boundary conditions tested work well at the inlet boundary; however, similar results are not obtained at the outlet boundary. For the same cell size, the schemes that employ first- and second-order corrections lead to a smaller pressure difference compared to schemes applying no corrections. The best predictions can be obtained by using first-order corrections with finer cell size close to the boundary. For most of the simulated cases, the boundary condition employing the characteristic scheme with nonequilibrium effect leads to the minimum simulation time. Considering the nonequilibrium effect, prediction of inlet and outlet pressures and the speed of simulation, the characteristic scheme with nonequilibrium effect performs better than all the other schemes, at least over the range of parameters investigated herein.
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